Originally Posted by
Sith_Apprentice While point 1 is a good explanation jrohland, point 4 is not entirely correct. RIM does indeed have to perform upgrades to their network to plan for LTE, and they have been doing small maintenance windows every weekend or two in areas across the world for the last couple of months to uprade for LTE. Think of it this way, RIM is not an ISP per se, as you cannot get service directly through them, but they are more of a corporate data center. You use your home ISP to connect to the internet, and then VPN to your work, where you can access all of your work applications. RIM acts very much like this, and your carrier is like your home ISP. Now you can access. This works the same for WiFi devices as well, just sans carrier (instead using a traditional ISP).
RIM does not want to become a carrier, they would lose that game very quickly.